Sunday, March 18, 2012

Art and Nature

Originally I had planned for a day just on nature, but since the weather would not cooperate, I had to improvise. Here are the activities we did today...and I have to say, that the kids woke up this morning and asked me what we were doing today, and what we were going to learn about.

I am so happy..this is why:

Best Comment: "You are the best mom ever!"

Paint a birdhouse - First experience using acrylic paint. It was a great lesson on using a different paintbrush for each colour, trying not to mix colours, having a plan of how they wanted to paint before they began, and taking their time. They all did really well.

More painting..a memory box for all their special treasures. If your kids are like mine, they like to collect everything, and everything that you think is garbage has a special meaning to them. Now they each have a place to store them. It makes me happy when we do handprints...to see how fast they grow up. The neat thing was talking about it while they painted their creations and relating our own growth to the growth of plants.

Make a suncatcher.Michael's has some really neat little kits for short art activities. These were tiny beads, that we placed in a metal frame and then heated it up in the oven. It took some patience with the tiny beads, but we were all successful. Too bad there wasn't much sun!

Lunch: Huge sub sandwich shaped like a caterpillar! Wish I took a picture.

Plant bean seeds - We had started sprouting them last weekend, with paper towel in a jar..so they wanted to plant them in the dirt. We had a good discussion on growing seeds, and what it takes to keep the plant healthy. Again, relating it back to their own bodies, and more reinforcement in healthy eating.

Cleaned out garden area (to get it ready for planting in April), and found all sorts of bugs to have as "pets". I think they discovered a total of 4 slugs, 2 snails, 5 rolypoly bugs, 8 worms and a large spider. They trapped them in jars for a few hours to see what they would do..asked it they could keep them inside...yeah right. They freed them in the dirt instead.

Lego building..of course. We do this everyday.

A trip to the BMX track..just to look. We were not able to bring our bikes, because of the rain, but the boys really wanted to see the track. Tyler wants to start BMX racing this year, so we thought we would find out where the closest track was. After seeing it, he says, "Mom, I totally want to do this!"

Jumping around in the basement with Dad - The boys love going downstairs for some rough play time with their Dad, and it gives Mom a chance to cook dinner and take a bit of a break. They shoot hoops, play tag, and generally jump around, make up games, and have a ton of fun. A good way to end this day!